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Showing posts from July, 2024

Commitment to Advancing Education in Ethiopia

 “We want to rebuild, and to do it with your help.” ~ Aaron Fossi, representative from Save the Children, Saint David's partner in our Ethiopia Schools Initiative Ten summers ago in June of 2014, I traveled with three young alumni who had served as Student Council Presidents (Colin Johnson ’11, Jack Mullin ’12, and Skakel McCooey ’13) to Tigray, Ethiopia, for the official opening of the Saint David's Kalina School. All of the money raised to build the new elementary school for Muslim boys and girls had come from the planning and fundraising conducted by our boys over three years, led by the eighth-grade student council under the guidance of their teacher, Tom Ryan. The boys conceptualized and ran a cornucopia of activities and events: walk-a-thons, pay-to-play sports, ice cream and t-shirt sales, and a not-to-be-missed trivia quiz show that pit teams of students against faculty and parents. The Ethiopia Schools initiative was the culmination of one of two major sixtieth-anniver